This is not one of those periodic “ End of Reading ” Atlantic click bait essays. Americans—well, the kind who read books or newsletters about books—are well-versed in the challenges with literacy and education that have stretched on for decades. Rather, today we’re tackling the multi-year, fairly rapid—at least relative to book industry speed—radical change that book publishing has experienced over the past decade.

First, the entire industry boomed in Covid— writing is a hobby and reading for pleasure is, too—and has trudged along as it usually does, staying flat, growing a little over the years since 2020. But for the past decade the market for nonfiction has slowly collapsed. What has happened in the last ten years 1 is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction.…